Women as Lovers

After the relatively buttoned-down Air Force, the latest from Xiu Xiu is frantic and wild, with swatches of noise and Jamie Stewart's
voice often quivering on the edge of a panic attack.

Art-making involves getting what's inside on the outside, but usually it passes through a sterilizing filter first. But with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart everything spills out unmediated and mucky. To put a fine point on it, on Women as Lovers' "Black Keyboard", over a serpentine acoustic guitar and synth dirge, Stewart sings, "Why would a mother say such things/ Why add tongue to a kiss goodnight?" That line is an attack against commonly held virtues of understatement and discretion, and Stewart's willingness to revolt audiences with squeamish personal details that make him seem more scarily fucked-up than sensitive or emotionally open is what makes his music unique. His art seems to be more about who he is than who he'd like to be, and it's the tension between the mores of taste and Stewart's honesty that brings us back, despite ourselves, time and again.

And, of course, the music itself, a nebulous but forceful concoction of sopping wet harpsichords, detonating percussion, submerged rock, atonal scaffolding, and unhinged electro-pop. Recent Xiu Xiu albums have been less likely to make me feel nauseous than Fabulous Muscles and its forebears, and I figured I'd just gotten acclimated to their approach. But the rawness of Women as Lovers indicates that maybe, for awhile, they'd gotten acclimated to it themselves. The Air Force found Xiu Xiu in full-bore confessional mode, yet it was so mannered that the confessionals lost their seamy edge and verged on pure aesthetics. "Buzz Saw" and "Boy Soprano", great songs both, were uncommonly buttoned-down for Xiu Xiu, and "Hello from Eau Claire" was almost a Moldy Peaches song. But where Air Force made venting seem rather academic, Women as Lovers is frantic and wild, with swatches of noise skidding around and Stewart's voice quivering on the edge of a panic attack-- even in the whispery sections.

In this light, "Under Pressure" is an apt cover choice, as the whole album conveys the sense of something about to boil over. With homely, impassioned vocals by Michael Gira, and the song's slick iconic bassline contrasted by a ragged interpretation of its arrangement, it takes on an air of desperation. Xiu Xiu's music is all about discomfort, but Stewart and co. have become quite comfortable in this conceptual space, and are able to inhabit it like painters making wild, broad smears that intuitively cohere into a look that is distinctly theirs.

On "I Do What I Want, When I Want", a pummeling post-punk groove dressed up with strident synth peals and pitched percussion, Stewart sounds direly imperiled, especially when the free-jazz horns start ripping through the already-claustrophobic mix. "In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall" is an apocalyptic atonal composition with a driving backbeat, and Stewart commands it masterfully, his voice sometimes climbing the slope of the wreckage, sometimes punching in abruptly at its screaming peaks. "No Friend Oh!" thrums like an engine, with anxious flurries of touch-tone synth and manic brass. The quieter compositions offer no relief from the mounting sense of impending catastrophe. "Guantanamo Canto" smears bending chimes, headachy percussion, loony-bin whistles, and allegorical sirens across a disorienting blankness, as Stewart says it plain: "My country needs its freedom/ To contradict your humanness." The Air Force gave us Xiu Xiu as a crystallized concept, but Women as Lovers sounds no more conceptual than a spurting artery. On "F.T.W.", a clicky acoustic ballad that eventually erupts into a squeaking-helium hell of noise, Stewart whimpers, "Am I all right? Do I look all right?" He doesn't, and one feels for him, although maybe there's some small solace in that fact that as a musician, not-all-right is his best look.